Stay ConnectedDr. Stephen Sloan of Baylor’s Institute for Oral History and Department of History explores the people, places, and stories that have shaped Waco, Texas.
Through interviews, local-history insights, and narrative storytelling, the podcast highlights both well-known events and lesser-told community histories—helping listeners learn more about Waco and its place in broader Texas history.
In September of 1936, much of Central Texas was enduring heavy rainstorms and flooding, with Waco especially hard-hit. Cresting at
41 feet, the Brazos River burst through a levee a mile above town, resulting in a torrent that put much of East Waco under water. Approximately two thousand residents were left homeless, and city manager W. C. Torrence ordered martial law in the flooded area.
Alva Stem, former director of Waco Parks and Recreation, recalls
the floodwaters in Cameron Park:
"The flood was up to one of the shelter houses just below Proctor Springs, and that was as close as we could get to the playground because the water was up above our heads by the shelter house. And I can remember us kids going down there and taking our bathing suits and swimming out to this shelter house, then climbing up on top of it and diving off into the floodwaters, like crazy kids would do. But we were good swimmers back in those days."
Waco native Frank Curre Jr. shares his memories of the '36 flood:
"And they boxed off our brand new Washington Street Bridge because it had pillars under it and they thought it would wash them out. They opened the Suspension Bridge because it was suspended from one side to the other. You could travel on that. Barns would come floating down your river, and they'd crash into the bridge and be chickens in that old barn, be hogs coming down, horses, cows. A great big fat hog come out; we wrestled him down. We asked the sheriff's deputy or policeman or something, we said, What do you want us to do with him? Said, ‘Take him home if you want him.' Well, that night, Mama and my step-daddy was putting up sausage. (laughter)"
Curre, with Dorothy Head Powell, describes East Waco:
"Where Elm Street is and Dallas Street, we had a streetlight over there on Dallas and Elm. The bottom of that streetlight was dipping in the water. And you know the two-story red brick—"
Powell: "East Terrace."
"That water come up to that balcony on that two-story house."
Woodrow Carlile recalls how the flood affected Edgefield, the neighborhood where he grew up:
"The water got into the yard and perhaps two feet high in the yard. But I believe our house was constructed to where the water could get under the house. Maybe our floors were three feet off the ground. I don't ever recall water in the house."
He remembers an odd sight at Edgefield Baptist Church:
"Our piano in the basement of the church was floating around."
Carlile used to stake his family's dairy cows near the river, and he tells about rescuing one with water up to his waist:
"I recall walking Sarah down Bosque Street away from the river toward Fifth Street with my tennis shoes around her neck, and I was barefooted. I thought more of my tennis shoes than I did my feet, evidently."
In the 1930s, after decades of devastating floods throughout Texas, the U.S. government began authorizing the construction of dams along Texas rivers to control excess rainfall. This led to the Whitney Reservoir, which was completed in 1951 on the Brazos River and has prevented in Waco floods like the one in 1936.
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Passenger rail travel in America enjoyed its heyday in the early 1900s, carrying at its peak in 1920 an estimated 1.2 billion
passengers that year. Trains made travel possible and relatively comfortable even in inclement weather, something no other method
of transportation could offer at the time. In 1911, Texas became the state with the most railroad mileage, a position it has not relinquished.
Mary Sendón of Waco recalls a train ride she took around 1908:
"When I was about seven, my father and my Grandmother Kemendo took me with them to Houston on a train. And that, to me, was the most wonderful experience I ever had in my life. My grandmother had relatives there. And I had never been anywhere on a train. I didn't know what a train was like even. And I remember my grandmother got train-sick. She was riding backwards; that's what did it. Well, there was a doctor on the train, and he said, ‘Well, just let her lie down on this—' It wasn't a divided seat; it was kind of a bench. And they let her lie down to rest, you know. So there was a man and a woman sitting just close by. Turned out to be a Jewish couple, the Herzes, H-e-r-z. They had a cigar store in Waco. And they asked me to come and sit with them, so I went and sat with them. And I always remember the first time I ever had a Nabisco—you know, they used to sell little Nabisco wafers in little tin boxes? Just real thin wafers. I remember that the boy that came—they called the butcher boy that would come through selling things on the train. They bought me a box of those, and that was the first time I had ever tasted them. But they were friends of my dad's because they had business close to his shop."
East Texas native Avery Downing, former Waco ISD superintendent, recalls a train adventure from the 1920s:
"I remember going to the Dallas fair on a special assembled there in Marshall–Longview. I had a little experience there one time. I had spent all my money except a quarter. And I saw that I had a few minutes left before I got on the train to go back, so I decided I'd buy me a couple of pounds of grapes. I ran back down to this little old stand that had the grapes, bought them. When I got back, the train was moving out, and I had to catch that thing on the run. I remember that. And I wonder till this good day—I considered myself a shy and timid fellow—I wonder what I would have done if I'd missed that train: no money and no acquaintances. I don't know." (interviewer laughs)
During its golden years, passenger trains seemed to be permanently ingrained in American culture, but they fell victim to the proliferation of cars, Interstate highways, and airlines as America prospered. By 1970 only the Santa Fe and Southern Pacific were still operating passenger rail service in Texas, and the following year remaining trains were turned over to Amtrak.
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Before television and computers monopolized our free time, chasing police calls was a popular hobby. People needed only a radio, the knowhow to tinker with it, and a car.
Charles Armstrong, a lifelong radio enthusiast and Waco resident, explains how he and wife Ruth had access to police dispatches through the 1940s, 50s, and 60s:
"They was on AM, but they were up high on the band. On your car radio or house radio, you could turn it far as you go plumb up to the end of the band. You could take you a screwdriver and go in the back, and you could change the frequency. You could raise it up a little bit by using what's called an antenna tuner, and you could reach the police department. You could hear them on there dispatching. So we could listen to them, and if it was anywhere close, we'd get in the car and go.
"And then it didn't last very long. I guess people got to bothering the police department and maybe too many people following them, so they went to FM, frequency modulation. I run up on a ad in one of the surplus books. We bought a tank receiver. It was for army tanks, twelve-volt operated. And so we'd chase them on FM."
Fires, car crashes, homicides—the Armstrongs went to it all. And their adventures influenced a young man named John Sherrell:
Charles Armstrong: "We'd chased so many times, so long that we knew every policeman on the force. In fact, the boy that used to ride with us to chase the calls, he said, ‘Boy,' said, ‘I'd like to be a policeman.' I said, ‘Well, they've got a school open down there.' And John went down and took a test and got in the police department, and he stayed on there for forty-something—forty years."
Ruth Armstrong: "And he's been on there for—he was on there for years."
Charles Armstrong: "And he ended up being a detective, and he got a taste of it from us."
When something interesting came over the police band, the Armstrongs often picked up nearby friends Harry and Lois Raines. Mr. Raines describes one disturbance that took place near the former post office at Franklin Avenue and Eighth Street: two soldiers were harassing a female and called in friends as backup when police arrived. Mr. Armstrong and Mr. Raines decided to help out:
"There were about two trucks sitting over by the post office there, and they whistled for them, and they all jumped out. So we was all out there fighting. And they'd tore up this policeman's uniform. And I was out there fighting; I was stomping his hat up. (laughs) And he had his gun out. He was hitting them up the side of the head with it. We loaded them in our car, took them to police headquarters, (interviewer laughs) the soldiers dressed in civilian clothes. This police had hit them up the side of the head, you know, and it didn't bring them down or nothing. Shoved them in a car, hit their head up against the side of the car, it didn't bother them. So they must have been hocked up on something, you know.
"And so they took them down there and drove in there. They'd reported we'd kidnapped those soldiers. These other guys in the truck, they went in the post office, called, said we'd kidnapped them. (laughs) And so we drove in down there, some policemen's standing out there, and they said, Is this the car kidnapped them soldiers? We said, No, we didn't kidnap them. We're bringing them in jail."
The first commercial police scanners hit the market in the 1970s, and today all kinds of scanning equipment exists, with many feeds streamed over the Internet. Several regulations of the practice have been put in place since the days when the Armstrongs and Raineses were listening in.
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This is Living Stories, featuring voices from the collections of the Baylor University Institute for Oral History. I'm Kim Patterson.
Dr. Stanley E. Rutland served as president of Paul Quinn College from 1969 through 1976. Under his leadership the college enjoyed many improvements, among them accreditation for the first time with the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools in 1972.
Dr. Norman G. Ashford describes the climate of Paul Quinn in 1971, when he came on board as a biology professor:
"I remember well one time where we had a meeting in the evening where we were going over the accreditation procedures and the required reports, et cetera. Well, we started meeting, I believe it was at seven o'clock in the evening, and that meeting lasted till two o'clock in the morning. So it gives you an idea of the events taking place."
Dr. Rowena Keatts explains she was working as a cataloger in the Paul Quinn library when Rutland enlisted her help in getting the college accredited:
"He walked down there and walked in that back door and says, ‘Mrs. Keatts, I am making you head librarian. I've checked your transcript, and what I want you to do is go back'—I didn't have my master's degree then. I think I lacked nine hours of having it. He said, ‘I'm making you head librarian here.' And I said, ‘No, you didn't either.' I got my things and went home.
"When I got home my husband said to me, said, ‘What are you doing? What have you been doing all day?' And I said, ‘Shoot. I've had twenty-five years of teaching. That man come telling me he's making me head librarian, and I'm not going to do it.' He didn't say a word. But he looked at me, and he continued—we were having dinner—and he said, ‘Well, can you do it?' I said, ‘Yes, I can do it, but I'm not going to. I'm going to sit down and draw my teacher's retirement when I get older.' He said, ‘I believe if I were you, and those old people paid ten cents a brick to build some of those buildings there when they were built, and you can do just that little bitty thing, and you don't want to do it? I believe if I were you, I believe I'd go do it.' I didn't do a thing but get all my things, put them back in my car and brought them—come back over to Paul Quinn and sit down."
Although reluctant at first, Keatts took over the task at hand with gusto:
"When the team came in they had no problem whatever with the library. That library was in tip-top shape. "
Interviewer: "I see."
"But I tell you, Dr. Rutland was a man that if you would work with him—he was a learned man. I dare say he is one of the best presidents I've ever seen because he went to each department to find out what was needed, what was lacking. And if they had to have money, he went somewhere and got it. The people here in Waco didn't like him too much because—at first, because they said he stayed on the plane too much going places. But when he went someplace, went those places, he brought something back with him."
Interviewer: "I see."
"And he was able to see and he knew how to meet the needs of Paul Quinn College. And he did it."
Paul Quinn College left Waco in 1990 and moved into the former Bishop College campus in Dallas. In 2009, SACS revoked Paul Quinn's accreditation, but two years later the college attained membership with another accrediting agency, Transnational Association of Christian Colleges and Schools.
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The GI Bill is a term often associated with the years immediately following World War II, but it has existed in some form or fashion since then. A revamped version approved by Congress in 2008, known as the Post-9/11 GI Bill, has given new life to the program and increased the number of veterans on college campuses throughout the country.
Brandon Ewing served in the marine corps for five years and entered Baylor University in 2009 on the new GI Bill to pursue a bachelor's degree in economics and international studies. He describes his experiences as a student veteran in a 2011 interview:
"I purposefully gave up my college-age years—I guess typical college-age years—to go into the military and to do that, but you still—those years are formative and they still make you who you are, and so, you know, I still went through the same kind of thing in the military. So when I come out of the military and go into college then I'm put back with people that are just going through that. So I always feel like I walked back into—it's not like high school, but I always felt like I kind of went back into that—it's great to be older and to have experience. When I was in high school, you know, I was a A and B student, but I could have done a lot better. I could have pushed myself a lot harder. I understand that now, so there's a lot of advantages to being older and to being here and doing it. And in a lot of ways, you know, people always say, If I knew then what I know now, well, I kind of get that. I kind of am in that position, which is—which is great."
Lieutenant Colonel Matt Pirko came to Baylor in 2010 with 20 years in the air force and enrolled in the master's program in information systems with a security emphasis. In his second semester at Baylor, he reflected on his return to the university setting:
"Having lived in Italy for three years my wife and I were both able to learn the language, so I've become involved—I'm the vice president of the Italian Club here on campus. I'm secretary of the Graduate Business Association. I think the students here for the most part are here to really learn and challenge themselves a little bit. Undergrads are always going to be undergrads, and that's going to be an—mean some differences in the approach. But I think that, honestly, being an older student in this setting, even in the undergraduate classes, it gives a certain different perspective. Some of the professors have a tough time dealing with that because you have more practical experience than they do in certain areas. It kind of scares them a little bit. But I think the kids get something out of hearing, oh, there's someone who's been there, done that, as opposed to just the esoteric nature of academia. Yeah, there's the real world, and then there's academia. We have to pull the two together a little bit more, but I think that I can add something to that by being here. And it's—Baylor's given back a lot to me too. I've enjoyed my time here, and I enjoy what I do."
Pirko explains what he sees as the benefit of having student veterans at colleges and universities:
"I mean, it sounds a little cliché to say it, but I think the caliber of students that you get, when they've had military experience of any kind, is going to be slightly different and slightly higher than a normal undergraduate coming directly out of a high school. That sounds pretentious a little bit, but I think it's true."
In 2012, both Ewing and Pirko graduated with their respective degrees. The Post-9/11 GI Bill has undergone some changes since it was introduced but is still going strong. This fall semester of 2013, Baylor has approximately 100 student veterans attending classes.
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The clothing industry in the United States was at its peak in the mid-1900s. Reports show that by 1957, Americans were spending more than $25 billion annually on clothes, nearly twice the amount spent
on automobile purchases and eight times the figure spent on private education. Waco was home to several clothing factories during this time that employed many women—companies like Hawk & Buck and
J. M. Wood.
Estelle Pederson, who moved to Waco in the early 1940s, worked for nearly forty-five years in the clothing industry, much of that time as an inspector. She describes the demands of the work:
"They wanted you to make production, and that's for sure. And you really had to work hard to make production because if you didn't make production they would lay you off sure as the world. And, well, I was lucky all those years. I made production most of the time. But I mean it wasn't fooling around. I mean you had to work. And they inspected your work, and if they find a repair they throw it back at you. They'd get on to you. You had to do the best you could, and they sure didn't like for you to let some repairs go through, but it is hard to catch everything. But I tried to do the best I could and fast as I could, and it wasn't easy. Then they'd time you right there and see how fast you—if you was just playing over. And if you could do so-and-so, well, you could do it all the time. And they'd stand behind you, and you wouldn't know they was timing you, and so they'd catch you. (laughs) So that was kind of—if I knew they was looking—watching you, it makes you nervous."
Pederson explains one way the industry changed over the years:
"Seem like they wasn't quite as strict when we first went to work. We could get by. Sometimes we run out of work, we'd sit around a little bit. But there at last, it had changed quite a bit. They was really strict. And you had to keep busy, or they'd send you home. (laughs) Well, you did learn to do different things so when you did run out of work—I even learned to press and steam press. (laughs) Oh, that was when you sure had to watch your fingers so you didn't press your fingers."
Long-time Waco resident Louise Murphy worked as a seamstress in the forties. She recalls when her employer introduced an assembly line into the factory:
"Now, when we first went to work, our work was one machine to the other, one machine to the other. And we were on army khaki pants. Well, they put these pants up on conveyor, and it went from one—that keeps you from having to reach back and get your work because that conveyer brought your work to you. And they thought it would save time. That's whenever we began to have trouble because if one stop and does repair, the whole line is affected, see."
In the 1970s, the clothing industry began to fade in America, as it became more cost effective to import clothing from countries such as China, South Korea, and Taiwan. But in recent years the industry has seen a boost from American retailers who want to restock and respond to fads quickly, as well as have more control over inventory and quality.
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Madison Cooper is a legendary figure in Waco. He put the city in the national spotlight in 1952 when his novel Sironia landed on the New York Times' Best Seller List and was known about town as an
eccentric bachelor. But Cooper's greatest contribution to Waco was his philanthropic spirit, from sponsoring civic programs to establishing the Cooper Foundation in 1943 for the purpose of bettering Waco.
Martha Lacy Howe, great-niece of Madison Cooper, visited as a child the Cooper home on Austin Avenue, now home of the Cooper Foundation. She recalls the housekeeper:
"Bertha was there. After Mrs. Cooper passed away, Madison asked Bertha if she would stay and do laundry and serve him meals. And she was thrilled to do that. She lived in the garage—up at the top of the garage. And she was a wonderful cook and a lovely person. And she would call my mom—we lived on the other side of the lake—and she said, ‘Next time you come in town, come to the house, and I've made some cookies,' and—or one time a big cake. I mean, you just don't forget things like this. (laughter) And we would go in that porte-cochère on the side of the house and up those steps. And the kitchen was—always smelled good, and it was nice and warm."
Howe recounts a comical story about her great-uncle and Citizens National Bank:
"He would walk down Austin Avenue every day, and he wore kind of shabby clothes a lot; he worked at that. (laughs) He knew how to look nice. My grandmother would tell me all this. And he would walk down to the bank and go in where Mildred Rast, my grandfather and my father's secretary―we called her Pud. She was quite famous. But he would go down there and go through her trash and use her used carbon paper; take it home, and he wrote Sironia up in the top parts of the Cooper home and wrote short stories before that, but I don't think they sold very good—but on used carbon paper. I mean, I think he could have probably bought a small package at the dime store, don't you think? (laughter) But he used Mildred Rast's used carbon paper that she had already thrown away. (laughter) But he kind of worked at that—that aura that he—he worked at it; he liked it."
Cooper never wanted a fuss made about his philanthropy, as Howe describes:
"He had a reputation of being very tightfisted, but I believe he was a far more generous—even with his family, than he wanted anybody else to know. He gave a lot to Waco, but he gave a lot anonymously. He gave to the Community Chest, and they thought, Well, my goodness, Madison's giving some money to us; maybe he's interested. And they asked him to be on the board, and he never gave them another nickel. (laughs) So he would give it all anonymously."
Madison Cooper died at 62 in 1956 and left his entire estate of nearly $3 million to the Cooper Foundation. Using the income from this bequeathal, the foundation has been able to award more than $20 million in grants over the years to various Waco projects.
Living Stories is funded in part by a Cooper Foundation grant to the Institute for Oral History.
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This is Living Stories, featuring voices from the collections of the Baylor University Institute for Oral History. I'm Louis Mazé.
Merriam-Webster defines philanthropy as "goodwill to fellowmen; especially : active effort to promote human welfare." The word is by no means new. The ancient Greeks called it philanthropia and thought the idea was the key to civilization. Waco is fortunate to claim several philanthropists as its own.
Jim Hawkins, founder of J-Hawk Funding Corporation, reflects on why he gives:
"The only difference in our community and any other community is the people in it. And those people can make the difference. And if you share with the community to build a better community, it's going to pay off. You're going to—you're going to get gratification many times over. That's what makes it so, for me—to—when I go through town now and see the projects that they said that we couldn't do, that we've done. You know, I never will forget in 1965 when I was president of the chamber of commerce—junior chamber of commerce, there were three projects that we identified that needed to be done. As a young man then, it seemed like it was more than you can ever expect: low-water dam, the junior college, and the convention center. We didn't have a convention center. And we set out, got all three of those. And, I mean, looking back on it now, when you go by all this, you're able to really enjoy the history and knowing what can be done if you really put your mind to it. The people in the community make the difference. And you make it what you want it to be."
Bernard Rapoport discusses why he founded the Bernard and Audre Rapoport Foundation after selling American Income Life Insurance Company:
"I look up in the sky, and, for me, I say, ‘Well, there's something greater than I am. And that's God. And the rest of it is you have to behave yourself and accept responsibility.' Now, so many of these religious people, to me, are not religious because they don't accept responsibility. For example, when we did—when we sold the company, we got a lot of money, and we put half of it in the foundation. Some of my friends said, Well, you're crazy. Why did you do that? I said, ‘Because I owed it.' Said, Who'd you owe it to? I said, ‘To society.' I said, ‘Anybody that thinks they're a self-made man is an idiot. I mean, if I had to make a list of all the people that helped me get to where I am,' I said, ‘there's not enough paper in the world. And I was good at managing, and I was good at motivating, and so we were able to build a company. But how many people do you think helped me do that?' The only guy that I can't stand is a self-made man because I know I'm talking to an idiot."
The lives of these generous men speak well to the adage that money only brings happiness when you use it to help others.
Living Stories is funded in part by a Cooper Foundation grant to the Institute for Oral History.
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This is Living Stories, featuring voices from the collections of the Baylor University Institute for Oral History. I'm Louis Mazé.
For most families during the Great Depression, Christmas was not a time for extravagance. Money and jobs were difficult to come by, and it was all some families could do to keep food on the table.
Retired Baylor physics professor Robert Packard remembers how hard times called for creativity. He describes a plan he came up with while visiting his cousins in the Temple area one Christmas during the Great Depression. Children looking forward to Santa's visit this year should not listen to the following:
"They lived in the country. And so Christmas, when it came, we got no presents. We might get a bag of—an apple or something. So I told my cousin, I said, 'Why don't we kidnap Santa Claus? He's got all these gifts, and he bypasses us, but he brings us something.' So we went to bed on Christmas Eve early. The bedroom I was in—and I was the only boy, and my sister and then my cousins were girls. So they had a room, and I had a small room. So anyway, we climbed out the window—out in the country—with a rope that we were going to tie up Santa Claus. (laughter) But we were standing there in the cold and waiting and waiting and waiting and probably shivering, and then we happened to look in the window and see our parents taking toys off the top shelf. So suddenly we realized there was no Santa Claus, but we knew we now could direct our interest directly to the parents."
Ruth and Charles Armstrong, both longtime Waco residents, remember the gifts they received as youngsters during the Depression:
"Now sometimes I would get a doll—not a real, real expensive doll but nice dolls, you know—and socks, a little iron, just typical little things that little girls would like."
"I was more fortunate, I guess. I don't know of a Christmas that I didn't get at least one large—what I call a large gift would be a full-size wagon. And I've got a picture there on my new bicycle, and I've got another picture where I was in a little old car you sit in there and pedal it, you know. But I had two older brothers that worked and my daddy, too—I was the youngest one for several years there—so I got a few extra things that some of the other kids didn't get. But as far as times, our times were just as—got rough, too. We had a hard time, too. But seem like on Christmas I came out ahead in the neighborhood."
Mr. Armstrong describes the tradition of hanging a stocking:
"Everybody hung their socks up. We didn't have a fireplace, but we'd hang them up wherever it was convenient, you know, around close to the tree after we started having a tree because we'd still put gifts under the tree. But before we had a tree we'd hang up near the stove, and the bigger the sock the better. I'd get the biggest sock I could find, hang up there, and you could always count on fireworks. There was always some firecrackers in there, always apples and oranges in there."
As hard as times were during the Great Depression, families with some type of income still managed to make sure the children had gifts at Christmas. With the current economy and ever-increasing commercialization of Christmas, it's helpful to look back and realize that children do not need heaps of presents to grow up with wonderful memories of Christmas.
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This is Living Stories, featuring voices from the collections of the Baylor University Institute for Oral History. I'm Kim Patterson.
In Tennessee in 1866, a year after the Civil War ended, six Confederate veterans formed an organization called the Ku Klux Klan for amusement. Shortly after, local Klan groups began popping up all over the South and quickly became synonymous with hate and terror. Klan activity began to taper off in the late 1800s, but shortly after World War I began, a new Klan emerged and flourished nationwide, boasting around five million members at its height in the early 1920s.
Avery Downing, former superintendent of Waco ISD, recalls the prominence of the Klan in Northeast Texas in the early 1900s:
"The Ku Klux Klan problem was an extremely sensitive and explosive issue in my county, very muchly so. And my family was anti-Ku Klux Klan from the word go, absolutely. And you have to understand that that meant considerable criticism from many, many, many others in the community because Ku Klux Klan had quite a following."
Downing describes an encounter his uncle had with the Klan while in high school:
"My uncle and one of his classmates were debaters, and they loved to debate the question of Ku Klux Klan. And one night in a small church north of Hallsville, a Ku Klux Klan assembly of some sort of a service or ceremony in this small church. And my uncle and his friend went out there and defrocked one of the leading Ku Klux Klan members—and he was the pastor of the Methodist church in north Marshall—and caused quite a furor."
Waco native Helen Geltemeyer remembers the Ku Klux Klan in Waco in the late 1920s and a meeting she went to with her mother and sister:
"Well, they met quite a bit out on Speight Street. That was one of their biggest main—I mean biggest meeting place. And my family decided to go in that Model T car out there to find out what they were going to do. I'd say that's way out at like—I guess Twenty-eight [Street] or Thirtieth [Street] and Speight—way out, we called it. That was a highway to go to Temple—the Temple highway. But here they were out all on this field. And we got out to run down there to see what they were going to do, and they had already lit those sticks and marching and doing little things together. And Allene and I were standing there and saw Mr. Russell."
Interviewer: "Which was the neighbor across the street from you?"
"Amen—who ran the store. And we yelled, ‘Oh, hi, Mr. Russell!' We saw his feet. We knew him by his feet. We couldn't tell otherwise. (laughs) And Mama grabbed us and ran us to the car and went home because she said we were going to get her in trouble. So we didn't get to stay to see what was on, but they didn't have any murder or anything that I remember. Otherwise, that'd have been vivid in my mind."
The Great Depression severely hampered the Klan, but it was not the end, for desegregation and the Civil Rights Movement resulted in a third resurgence of the Klan. Today, membership in Klan chapters is estimated between five and eight thousand, with the majority of members in the South.
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